This view of consciousness is worked out on the basis of an evolutionary metaphysics. Man is viewed as an organism, placed amid the changing whirl of things, stimulated into action by his needs and wants, adapting himself to conditions, making the situation over, or meeting it habitually where he can and suffering the consequences where he cannot make the necessary adjustment. If this be taken, as would seem, for the ultimate truth about reality and man's place in it, it must be called a metaphysics. Against this background Dewey's logical theory is developed. The most important result, from the standpoint of the student of mind and spirit, is the reduction of self-conscious reflection to the position of a nervous function of the organism. The purely theoretical evidence by which this position is sustained should be subjected to closer scrutiny than can be undertaken in this limited space. The purpose of reflection, then, is to enable man to adapt himself to his environment, understanding by the environment the whole of the reality which surrounds him. The test of the mind and its newly projected modes of response [ideas] lies in its ability to meet the demands of the situation. The capacities and limits of mind are determined by the purpose for which it was evolved; it can enable a man to deal more effectively with his environment; it can do nothing else. It cannot speculate on the nature of reality as such, nor voyage on long journeys in search of truth! Its business is practical, here and now. Its problems are always set for it by circumstances, and these circumstances are concrete and specific. There is no such thing as adaptation at large or in general. The business of mind is to have, and to continually reconstruct, useful habits. So Dewey assures the American Psychological Association in 1899, in an address on "Psychology and Social Practice."[144] We must recognize, he says, "that the existing order is determined neither by fate nor by chance, but is based on law and order, on a system of existing stimuli and modes of reaction, through knowledge of which we can modify the practical outcome."[145] Psychology uninterpreted, he says, will never provide ready-made materials and prescriptions for the ethical life. "But science, both physical and psychological, makes known the conditions upon which certain results depend, and therefore puts at the disposal of life a certain method of controlling them."[146] These statements show the extent to which Dewey's view of knowledge has come to be controlled by biological conceptions. The evolutionary method is investigated in considerable detail in the next article to be considered, which was published in two parts in the _Philosophical Review_, 1902, under the title, "The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality."[147]